Cities are routinely eulogized as harbingers of progress and emancipation, as the locus of innovation and creativity. And, in fact, the historical record of cities in engendering artistic, scientific or societal creativity from the ancient Greece polis over Renaissance Florence, Modern Art Paris to New York’s ‘Warhol Economy’ is impressive. More recently, though, discords began to mingle with the harmonious choir praising the allegedly greatest invention of humanity. The fixation with the unique affordances of urban places, as the critique maintains, has systematically impoverished our understanding of creativity in the periphery. To rectify this urban bias, a veritable stream of research initiatives has been launched more recently to push the focus of scholarly debate on creativity from center to periphery, from the urban to the rural. While this challenge of the ontological privilege of the center appears overdue, Edge is not intended to simply shift the view-finder of academic inquiry from one static territorial category to another. Edge rather pursues three more ambitious aims.
First, Edge seeks to push beyond the prevailing perception of periphery as the non- and the beyond-center. The term periphery routinely amounts to hardly more than a residual category for deficient places suffering from a fundamental lack of those quintessential urban qualities that fuel innovation: Jacobs-externalities, Florida-amenities, and Glaeser-density. The first aim of Edge is to critically interrogate this narrow perception, and to move from a deficiency-fixated to an asset-based conceptualization of peripherality. Second, Edge aims at challenging the prevailing understanding of centrality and peripherality as adamant fate sealed by geography and history. Actors might deliberately choose a peripheral position as outsider to shield their creativity from the mainstream. Moreover, creative outsiders who transit between center and periphery might catalyze shifts in evaluative frames, and what used to be disdained as periphery morphs into a center of a new creative movement. Third, Edge probes into the interrelations between generation and valuation of novelty, and elucidates the dynamic interdependencies between center and periphery: Although peripherality might benefit the inception of novelty, centrality is essential for the valuation and authentication of the value of the novelty.
Program
Thursday, 21 November 2019
8:30 Registration
9:00 Welcome and Introduction
Gernot Grabher (HCU Hamburg) and Oliver Ibert (IRS Erkner)
PLACES
9:30 – 13:00 | Session 1
09:30 Amanda Kolson Hurley (Author and Journalist, Washington, DC)
“Peripheral vision: utopian suburb-building in the United States”
10:15 Candace Jones (University of Edinburgh Business School)
“Edinburgh: novelty and marginality at the center”
11:00 Coffee
11:30 Richard Shearmur (McGill University Montreal)
“Innovation in the geographic periphery: optics and relationships”
12:15 Thilo Lang (Institute for Regional Research, IfL Leipzig)
“Towards a hybrid conceptualization of innovation geographies:
knowledge sourcing of hidden champions in Germany”
13:00 Lunch
14:00 – 18:00 | Session II
14:00 Stoyan V. Sgourev (ESSEC Business School Paris)
"Reversing tempering: when ideas from the core
are radicalized at the periphery"
14:45 Heike Mayer (University of Berne)
“Slow innovation in Europe’s peripheral regions”
15:30 Coffee
16:00 Andy Pike (Newcastle University)
“Mixing, mutating and innovating managerial, entrepreneurial and
financialized governance in peripheral cities”
16:45 Michaela Trippl (University of Vienna) and
Jakob Eder (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
“Rethinking innovation in the periphery: asset-driven or challenge-driven?"
17:30 Ariane Berthoin Antal (Social Science Center Berlin, WZB) and
Julian Hamann (University of Hannover)
“Playgrounds and serious work in academia: an essay and research agenda”
Friday, 22 November 2019
JOURNEYS
9:00 – 10:30 | Session III
9:00 Richard Pascale (Oxford University Saïd Business School)
“Remedy of last resort: bringing discoveries of outliers into the mainstream"
9:45 Gino Cattani (New York University Stern Business School) and
Simone Ferriani (Università di Bologna)
“The legitimation journey of novelty“
10:30 Coffee
11:00 Chad Allan Goldberg (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
“The creative agent on the margin of two cultures”
11:45 Felippe Massa (Loyola University New Orleans) and
Siobhán O’Mahoney (Stanford University)
“Explaining the escalation of networked activism through
repertoire reconfiguration”
12:30 Lunch
13:30 - 16:30 | Session IV
13:30 Trevor Barnes (University of British Columbia Vancouver)
“The geographical materiality of a good idea”
14:15 Simone Ferriani (Università di Bologna) and Gino Cattani
(New York University Stern Business School)
“Overcoming the liability of novelty: the power of framing“
15:00 Coffee
15:30 David Stark (Columbia University New York)
"Creation and valuation of novelty at the margins: reflections"
16:30 Farewell